ABOUT RATEP
RATEP stands for 'Remote Area Teachers Education Program'
This program is for Aboriginal and Torres Strait people who want
to train, in their own time and at their own homes, to become primary
school teachers. This program was set up in 1990 and grows each year.
A Special Report for publication in Campus Review
by John Patrick (submitted Friday 23.1.98)
"Teaching the Teacher" has a meaning all of its own in RATEP - the Remote Area Teacher Education Program that has been providing pre-service teacher education to Indigenous students based in remote communities throughout mainland Queensland and the Torres Strait since 1990. With an unprecedented success rate averaging better than 85% over its 8 years of operation, RATEP has produced 57 Dip Teach graduates which is more than a quarter of the Indigenous teachers employed in Queensland. Some of these are already completing a fourth year through studies in vacation mode to
upgrade their award to Bachelor of Education level.
According to RATEP's Academic Co-ordinator Frank York in the School of Education at James Cook University, it is the unique combination of innovation and cultural and locational appropriateness that makes RATEP the success it has been to date. Underpinning that success is RATEP's Management Committee. It comprises representatives from the School of Education at James Cook University, the Tropical North Queensland Institute of TAFE, Education Queensland and remote communities themselves through their Ministerial Advisory Committee on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Education and their Torres Strait Island Regional Education Consultative Committee. The Committee strives to keep an equitable balance of Indigenous and non-Indigenous members.
As Frank explains: "By the very nature of its inter-systemic structure, RATEP is an innovative program. No other educational program in Australia combines educational institutional resources in the same way as RATEP does. The three systems of State Education Department, TAFE and University combine to provide a seamless process to take people from a limited Western education experience through a program specifically designed for their location". Frank believes that RATEP was probably the first Australian teacher education course to negotiate the integration of TAFE and University courses".
"RATEP was also the first teacher education course at undergraduate level, that was community based and fully delivered off-campus in Australia. There is no residential component apart from a two week orientation period in the first year. Apart from periodic teaching practice, students undertake all course requirements on-site, most of them in their home communities. A proportion of the teaching practicum is also undertaken in a local community school. Because of the centrality of family and extended kinship networks in their cultures, the importance of on-site community study to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people cannot be overly emphasized. RATEP therefore also addresses equity and access issues".
"Students maintain that, even after failing in other contexts, they are able to succeed in RATEP because of the culturally appropriate adaptation of certain materials and the flexibility of the modes of subject delivery. Traditional Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures are primarily oral cultures, and this predisposition carries over even for many indigenous people currently living in urban areas. Print material, which is a critical source of information traditionally in Western schooling is therefore problematic, or in the words of a RATEP student: White people have books all around them. Torres Strait Islander people don't have lots of books around them to get used to. This is compounded by the fact that many urban and most non-urban indigenous people do not use Standard Australian English as their principal language of communication. For all RATEP students, English is their second or third, and sometimes even their fourth language. This creates a need to present learning material in alternative modes to effect optimum learning".
"Another innovative element of RATEP that also happens to be culturally and locationally appropriate, is interactive multimedia (IMM) courseware - the medium used to deliver all subjects within RATEP's degree course. Many distance education programs use IMM for various units, modules, or specific subjects, but rely on residential schools, printed text and other conventional sources for the bulk of subject presentation. IMM permeates RATEP. This mode of delivery has proven particularly successful and culturally appropriate for Indigenous students". And RATEP's first Honour's graduate, Bernadene Yeatman agrees: "Doing coursework on CD-ROMs is compatible with cultural styles of learning through hands-on and visual stimulus...... [IMM technology] makes allowance for the cultural shame factor knowing that you can work at your own pace, make mistakes and no-one is watching you".
Notwithstanding all of the above unique features Frank insists that James Cook University's Bachelor of Education through RATEP is a mirror of its on-campus program, differing only in modes of delivery. He says that RATEP students study the same subjects, are taught by the same lecturers, complete assessment tasks at the same standard as their on-campus counterparts, and receive exactly the same award as students who undertake preservice teacher education at the Cairns and Townsville campuses.
He says that because of its well grounded theoretical, administrative and academic platforms, RATEP is admirably suited to the preparation of teachers particularly Indigenous teachers not only in Queensland, but nationally and even internationally. It seems that the recent purchase by the University of Notre Dame of RATEP's materials for its Kimberley remote area program and the interest being shown in Papua New Guinea and as far away as Hokkaido University in RATEP's mode of delivery, its innovation and its appropriateness, would bear testimony to these claims.
Copyright © Max Overton 1999
All Rights Reserved
